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A Disaster Epic (in Slo-Mo)

WATER CRISIS Seas could rise a dozen feet, over a thousand years.Credit
Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

The fourth report since 1990 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a huge network of climate experts operating under the United Nations, contained much to fear, but no clanging alarm bells were attached.

Before the report’s arrival on Friday, the consequences of global warming had been epically imagined — New Orleans-style swampings by superstorms, the specter of an Arctic meltdown and a water gush that would block heat-toting currents in the Atlantic Ocean and trigger an abrupt European cool-down.

But those advocating policies to blunt the growing human impact on the climate have long held out hope that a new threshold of substantiation, like the important conclusions of a major report, would break the public’s inertia. The incremental, “someday” issue of the climate would suddenly warrant a fast-motion response.

As it turned out, the panel’s scientific projections deflated some of the more dramatic possibilities.

The report includes the biblical risk of the world’s seas rising — everywhere — a dozen feet or more. Such a view renders a highly charged recent debate over whether seas would rise a few inches or a few feet in this century “lampoonable,” in the words of Jerry Mahlman, a veteran climate expert.

But the panel’s prognosis for sea level, while epic, is dispersed over dizzying stretches of time: a thousand years or more.

In essence, the debate over characterizing the near-term rise in seas is akin to arguing whether a car starting to roll down a hill toward a cliff is going 1 mile per hour or 2.

Scientists were left wondering if the public would grasp this as disaster.

How quickly does the water have to move toward your neck before you panic (especially if, like Leonardo DiCaprio in “Titanic,” you’re handcuffed to the ship)?

“Does it take a crisis to get people to go along a new path or can they respond to a series of rational, incremental gains in knowledge?” asked Ralph J. Cicerone, the president of the National Academy of Sciences, on Friday. “That’s the question.” Dr. Cicerone, an atmospheric scientist, once helped identify another looming threat: the harm to the ozone layer from chemicals.

One reviewer of the panel’s report, James G. Titus, who has been studying seas and warming since the 1980’s for the Environmental Protection Agency, has tried writing songs about the threat, hoping to catch the public’s attention.

But it’s the tune he sings at home on the Jersey Shore that might be worth the listen. In 2005, Mr. Titus spent $20,000 to elevate his house and yard about five feet.